I was going to wait until the election was done and dusted before replying to my Somerset stalker's five hundred and sixty-eighth unhinged blogpost about me (which, amusingly, he describes as his "second" - it would be fascinating to know what his technical excuses are for thinking all the others "didn't count"). However, on closer inspection the post contains a number of inaccurate statements - lies, for want of a better word - so just as a matter of principle I'm not going to let those go uncorrected.
The most blatant lie is also the most bizarre. Stuart claims that I "swiftly banned" him yesterday after he made a series of angry posts in the comments section of this blog. As I have explained umpteen times, it is quite literally impossible to "ban" anyone on the Blogger platform. When people troll or are abusive, the only options open to me are to delete comments individually (which itself has become much, much harder on the new interface that was introduced a few months ago) or to turn on pre-moderation. The fact that I'm currently following the latter course of action tells you all you need to know - if it were possible to "ban" people, that would solve the problem instantly and pre-moderation would be needless.
Incidentally, although I've deleted some of Stuart's individual comments in the distant past, I didn't do so yesterday (except for a couple of accidental duplicates which I removed as a tidying-up exercise). So this "banning" claim isn't based on some sort of innocent misunderstanding - it does appear to be a very intentional lie.
What he wants his readers to believe I was trying to prevent him from posting was a protestation that he did not in fact do what everyone saw him do yesterday - ie. tell his readers to vote for unionist parties in twelve specific constituency seats. He seems to think that his get-out-of-jail-free card on this is a comment he added at the end of his piece stating that the only seat in which he'd advocate a vote for a unionist party was Glasgow Southside. That would be just peachy if it wasn't for the inconvenient fact that this comment flatly contradicted the explicit and repeated advice earlier in the blogpost to vote against the SNP in the other eleven seats. The exact words used, again and again and again, were "Alba supporters cannot afford to vote SNP in those seats".
Here's my top tip, Stu: not everyone who reads your blogposts will be a complete idiot. Some of your readers, perhaps only a select few, but undoubtedly some, will be able to spot that your words mean what they say and that a nonsensical throwaway disclaimer doesn't negate them.
The second disgraceful lie is that I have not been supportive of Craig Murray, who faces a potential jail sentence due to his courageous reporting of the Alex Salmond trial. Stuart alleges that my supposed lack of support for Craig is because I think there is more "traffic" to be had from attacking Wings. The narcissism behind that statement is truly mind-boggling. The reality, of course, is that I've been vocal in my support for Craig, as the below tweet from late March amply demonstrates. At time of writing, it's been retweeted 196 times and 'liked' 593 times. Just because Stuart hasn't been paying attention doesn't mean that nobody else has.
Furthermore, one year ago I put my name to an open letter deploring the arrest and charging of both Craig and Mark Hirst. I've also spoken to Craig privately twice within the last few weeks - we mostly discussed politics, but I don't think he's in any doubt as to where my sympathies lie.
To return to the subject of Stuart's narcissism, you may have noticed that he seems to be incapable of writing an attack post about a fellow blogger without including a graph purporting to show that he has a much bigger readership. The obvious joke is that he's using the alleged size of his readership as a substitute for the size of his manhood. A few weeks ago he included Scot Goes Pop in a graph that showed how his stats towered above the other leading four pro-independence blogs. To which my reaction was the obvious: "so you're saying I'm in the top five, then?" In his new post he says that "hardly anyone" is reading Scot Goes Pop, and to illustrate his point reveals that SimilarWeb estimates that this blog has "only" had 464,872 page views so far this year. That's a rather interesting definition of "hardly anyone".
Of course it's unique readers that really matter, and on that measure the disparity in traffic between Wings and other websites shrinks. Stuart actually helpfully revealed his monthly unique readership the other day, and it looks as if it's roughly seven or eight times bigger than Scot Goes Pop's. That obviously still makes Wings the far more popular site, but a) that's something I've never disputed, and b) he would dearly love people to believe the gap is far, far bigger than it actually is. The reason why the number of page views can be so wildly misleading is that every time someone refreshes a page to read new comments, that's counted as another page view - and presumably people are doing that far more often on Wings.
My guess is that Stuart is lashing out because he realises he blew it yesterday. Until then, a decent number of people were giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming that his ultimate objective was still independence, even if his means of achieving it were dubious and convoluted. But the mask has now slipped. You don't achieve independence by electing Willie Rennie as the MSP for North-East Fife.
No, Stuart's agenda is something different. His single-minded objectives are to stop self-identification for trans people, and to gain revenge against Nicola Sturgeon. That doesn't mean he's actively opposed to independence, but it comes a very poor second to his real priorities.
